The Community Disaster Modeling System was developed for studying the relative costs and benefits of alternative hazard mitigation and recovery programs. The system is capable of dealing with sets of individual homeowners and businesses enabling users to construct representations of hazard-prone communities and to examine impacts of mitigation and recovery programs on residents of a community as well as on local, state, and federal agencies. This system was designed to provide a high degree of flexibility so that it is possible for the user to make substantial modifications without having to invest large amounts of time and skill or risk confusion in reprogramming. These features are illustrated by the construction of the hypothetical community of River City and a demonstration of how the system's damage and financial submodels are explicitly utilized in evaluating the impacts of floods as a function of alternative scenarios and policies. It is pointed out that users must make the commitment to experiment with the system to ascertain its value as a meaningful tool for policy analysis.